Traditionally, a sponge or foam used in the inner packaging or outer packaging of a product for protection and shockproof is gradually replaced by a pulp molding article molded by pulp. The pulp molding article (or paper-shaped product) uses pulp as raw material and dredged the pulp, compressed the pulp by the molds for forming the same. The pulp molding article can be recycled and remanufactured so as to comply with the trend of energy conservation and carbon reduction.
A conventional pulp molding machine for forming a paper shape product is divided into two separate operation machine, including a molding machine and a shaping machine which are not linked to each other. The automatic production line cannot be maintained in a consistent continuous operation, so that a semi-finished product must rely on artificial means to deliver between the molding machine and the shaping machine. Moreover, the molding machine for forming a paper shape product comprises a pulp-dredging stage and a thermo-forming stage. In the pulp-dredging stage, a plurality of molds are used for dredging a wet pulp from a paper slurry tank. During the thermo-forming stage, the plurality of molds are compressed and heated so as to decrease the humidity of the wet pulp and obtain the semi-finished product. Thereafter, the shaping machine is used for cutting superfluous edges of the semi-finished product to form the pulp molding article.
In addition, the conventional pulp molding machine reduces the moisture contained in the wet pulp only by performing the thermo-forming stage at once. After the pulp-dredging stage, the wet pulp in the molds contains a high proportion of the moisture content (more than 50% of the overall weight). In the following molding process, it always takes a very long cycle time to drain off water or vapor from the wet pulp compressed between the molds, such as the thermo-forming stage takes about 160 seconds to drain off water or vapor from the wet pulp for obtaining the semi-finished product/the pulp molding article. This invokes a low production efficiency in mass. Moreover, it is likely to crush the structure of the pulp molding article during the thermo-forming stage if a larger compression force is applied on the wet pulp at once. Accordingly, due to the thermo-forming stage is processed at once, the conventional pulp molding machine leads to a lower production efficiency in mass and easily crushes the structure of the pulp molding article.
Besides, the conventional pulp molding machine employs conventional aluminum mold for dredging the slurry and thermo-forming. The conventional aluminum mold is disposed to a mesh on a surface of the conventional aluminum mold for holding the slurry thereon. The mesh need to be replaced frequently. Also, the traces of the mesh will be imprinted on the surface of the semi-finished product/the pulp molding article.
Therefore, it is necessary to provide a pulp molding machine, a pulp molding process and a paper-shaped article to solve the above problems, such as shortening the production time of the conventional pulp molding process and maintaining the integrity of the semi-finished product/the pulp molding article.